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Ok, so it has been a while since I followed what was happening in the XBMC PVR world, since I didn't have the time to set everything up. I now have everything set up the way I want for media as a general rule, the one thing I am missing is PVR. That being said, when I did my research a year ago, it was still very new, and I imagine it has matured quite a bit since then. Here is what I want to do:
I want to run a PVR backend off a RPi. I already have a HDHRPrime, so I don't need the RPi to do any processing. I know that TVHeadend works on the RPi, and from what I have found, it looks like, with a bit of effort, mythtv does as well. Featurewise, I am looking for the following:
Ability to record TV (I know they both do this, not sure if there is a better/worse for this)
Watch Live TV
Pause Live TV/Timeshift
Automatically skip commercials? I know I might need an external app to do this, and if that were the case, I would then like to transcode the video into a format that takes up a bit less space...
So, that being said, which of the 2 options is best suited for me, from those in the know? Or is there another product that will work better that I didn't mention here?
Thanks!
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2013-06-28, 21:17
(This post was last modified: 2013-06-28, 21:19 by nokdim.)
I can only speak for MythTV but I have it setup with an HDHR and I love it and it runs smooth.
I tried TVHeadend but was not successful and ended up using MythTV.
I can record TV.
I can watch Live TV.
I can pause Live TV.
I use comskip under wine under ubuntu to detect and create .edl files to cut out commercials.
I use a custom PostProc script that uses mencoder to encode recordings into xvid to save space and rename to a format that XBMC can recognize and import into the library as well as send a library update command to XBMC after its done to update the library so all I do is sit back and watch TV.
Recorded shows come out at about 4Gig per hour and after encode they are 700M per hour, you can get better quality and smaller size if you get x264 encoding but I never got around to that and am happy with the xvid quality.
I use mc2xml to populate the epg for free.
I did use NPVR or NextPVR for a while on windows but ended up moving to MythTV so I didnt have to maintain a single windows machine.
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bry
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Sounds perfect nokdim. What are you running myth on?
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2013-06-28, 22:35
(This post was last modified: 2013-06-28, 22:35 by nokdim.)
I run it on an old Dell Optplex Gx620 I think, its like a dual core intel pre-i cpu with like 2 gig of ram. it takes a while to re-encode but I am never in a rush and have tons of stuff to watch so I dont care if it takes time. It runs on Ubuntu for OS.
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Do you record directly to a NAS, or locally?
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2013-06-28, 22:59
(This post was last modified: 2013-06-28, 23:00 by nokdim.)
to a NAS, its an unRaid box with about the same specs dual core old system with 2 gig of RAM and 4 TB of space protected by 2TB parity drive.
I modified the fstab on my MythTV box so it has a samba mount point of the NAS so it thinks its recording locally but its just a shared drive that gets mounted on boot.
my unRaid runs MySQL, SickBeard, Couchpotato, SAB so I have a shared library across all XBMC's and all content stored on NAS from all sources i.e. MythTV and SAB.
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2013-06-28, 23:01
(This post was last modified: 2013-06-28, 23:03 by teeedubb.)
+1 for mythtv. Can be a pain in the ass to setup but once you get it going its rock solid. To add to what nokdim said, one feature I rate of mythbackend is it ability to suspend when not in use and wake up automatically for recordings. It will stay awake when serving up media, recording, downloading, transcoding, rsyncing etc and is wakeable over the internet via wake on lan. I guesstimate my server is only in use for about 8 hrs per day so its electricity costs are a third of if it was on 24/7, and then there's wear and tear on the parts too. I use mythbuntu for my back end.
Nokdim: out of curiosity, why do you not use the built in com skip software in mythtv?
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tvheadend can do all of these as well, as has been said. For commercial skipping, you can use comskip under WINE or the native Linux port - although I've personally always had mixed results on both unless the channel DOGs are very predictable. Combine that with handbrake-cli in a post-processing script if you want to re-encode.
I think the best advice is always "try something and see if it works for you".
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Interesting. I will have to look into both. I just got my RPi for the task today, so I will try to install. Has anyone had any luck with MythTV on an RPi by chance? I found a thread online, but am running into all sorts of issues...
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nickr
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No you won't effectively run mythtv's backend on an rpi. There is insufficient RAM or processing power to properly run the mysql queries, particularly those run by the scheduler, and I doubt that disk IO or (if you are using a network based tuner) network IO would be sufficient.
Use a proper PC.
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
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In that case, what do you think of the Intel NUC? Does that possess enough power to do whatever I would throw at it via Myth?
